Daniel McLaughlinin Budapest profiles the Bolivian-born but much-travelled Eduardo Rózsa Flores, claimed by authorities to be the plot leader
EDUARDO RÓZSA Flores came to the end of an extraordinary and often bizarre journey in a Bolivian hotel room.
According to his blog, he was born in Bolivia in 1960 to a leftist Hungarian painter father and a Spanish teacher mother, who moved to Chile and then fled to Sweden after right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet ousted socialist leader Salvador Allende from power in Santiago in a 1973 coup.
Two years later the family arrived in Hungary, where Flores went on to become the last leader of his university’s communist youth group before the Soviet bloc collapsed in 1989.
For his compulsory national service, Flores served as a border guard at Budapest airport and, according to friends and Hungarian media, acted as a translator for international terrorist Carlos the Jackal when he used Budapest as a base from around 1983 to 1985.
Former acquaintances in Budapest say Flores found work as a journalist and correspondent's assistant for the BBC's Spanish-language service and Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia, which took him to former Yugoslavia as it descended into war in the early 1990s.
At this point, Flores abandoned journalism and joined the fighting, helping to establish a foreign volunteers brigade based around the northern Croatian town of Osijek, and fought for Croatia’s independence from Belgrade’s rule.
"The Serbs detained Eduardo for three or four days, beat him up and accused him of being a spy. He was livid and told a Croatian journalist soon afterwards that he wanted to fight," a close friend of Flores in Budapest told The Irish Timeson condition of anonymity.
Flores claimed to have been wounded several times in Croatia, and to have been promoted to the rank of colonel and given Croatian citizenship by then-president Franjo Tudjman.
But the Balkan wars also cast a dark shadow on Flores’ reputation, and caused several old Budapest acquaintances to shun him, particularly as rumours swirled that he may have ordered the killing of a Swiss and a British journalist who went to Croatia to investigate his volunteers brigade.
After the war ended in 1995, Flores returned to Hungary and wrote poetry (www.poetasdelmundo.com/verInfo_europa.asp?ID=1067) but was seen less frequently in Budapest. On his page on YouTube (www.youtube.com/user/eduflores), he said he was living in the country village of Szurdokpuspoki and described himself as an “international war correspondent-turned-platoon-leader” and said he was working as a journalist and actor.
Flores did play himself in a film that was based on his adventures, called Chico, and many of the tributes in Croatian and Hungarian posted on his YouTube pages and his own blog (http://eduardorozsaflores.blogspot.com) refer to him by that nickname.
In recent years, Flores converted to Islam and continued to support a bewildering array of causes, including independence for the Santa Cruz region of Bolivia where he was killed, opposing the US war in Iraq and calling for a Palestinian state.
“He was an idealist who would attach himself to underdog causes and identified himself with oppressed people. He could speak at a communist rally in the morning and a far-right one in the afternoon, and not see any contradiction,” said his old friend in Budapest.
Zoltan Brady, editor of the Kapumagazine that Flores wrote for, said he had gone to Bolivia last spring "to fight against its communist government" and for the independence of the province of Santa Cruz.
“Eduardo was a guerrilla fighter and was living in the Bolivian jungle for some time, having guerrilla activities everyday with thousands of his fellow fighters. But it is not true that he wanted to assassinate the president or anyone else. He was a solder and a guerrilla,” said Brady, who claims to have last talked to Flores just two days before his death.
His friend in Budapest also found it impossible to believe that he was plotting to kill Evo Morales.
“I think he probably met this group of people, including the Irishman, and bragged about what he had done and where he had been. And with his profile and perhaps some weapons with him, he was seen as the perfect guy to set up. He was not a spotless guy, that’s for sure, but he was not a terrorist either.”